Beg pardon?

To­wards the end of last month, the Cata­lan Nine were par­doned and re­leased from jails in which they had spent be­tween three and four years, hav­ing been judged guilty of mis­use of pub­lic funds, dis­obe­di­ence and sedi­tion for hav­ing or­gan­ised a ref­er­en­dum on Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence on Oc­to­ber 1st, 2017. (In the case of Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart, who were civic lead­ers at the time of their ar­rest, their ‘sedi­tion’ con­sisted of stand­ing on a trashed pa­trol car - they asked for per­mis­sion - and ask­ing a fu­ri­ous crowd to go home, even as mem­bers of the Civil Guard ran­sacked the Cata­lan Min­istry of the Econ­omy look­ing, in vain, for bal­lot boxes). For your av­er­age Eu­ro­pean by­stander, in­formed by his or her av­er­age Eu­ro­pean cor­re­spon­dents in Madrid, these par­dons not only demon­strate with­out a shadow of a doubt that Spain is a fully func­tion­ing democ­racy but might even mark the end of the Cata­lan con­flict.

Well, not quite. The par­dons carry con­di­tions: none of the re­cently re­leased can hold po­lit­i­cal of­fice of any kind until 2030 at the ear­li­est, and the par­dons can be re­voked - and those par­doned, re­jailed - if they com­mit a se­ri­ous crime. And what does that mean, ex­actly? No­body knows, ex­cept the not-un­bi­ased judges of the Supreme Court. Cuixart, for in­stance, may con­ceiv­ably make a pub­lic state­ment in favour of or­gan­is­ing an­other ref­er­en­dum, and just those few words might be enough to send him back to the slam­mer be­fore you could say Lluís Com­pa­nys.

And al­though these nine peo­ple have been legally sprung from cus­tody, there are three thou­sand other peo­ple fac­ing jail sen­tences or mas­sive fines for tak­ing part in pro-in­de­pen­dence demos or sim­ply for hav­ing held posts in the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment from 2011 on­wards. For ex­am­ple, Mar­cel Vivet, a 27 year old man from Badalona, has just been given five years for tak­ing part in a 2018 protest against a homage (or­gan­ised by a po­lice trade union) for those mem­bers of the Span­ish Na­tional Po­lice who had done such a good job of break­ing into polling sta­tions and beat­ing vot­ers bloody; ac­cused of dis­turb­ing the peace and hit­ting a Cata­lan po­lice­man’s right wrist, there is no vi­sual ev­i­dence against Vivet (but there are se­ri­ous prob­lems with the po­lice tes­ti­mony).

On the other hand, some­thing called the Court of Au­di­tors is now de­mand­ing a total of nine mil­lion euros from var­i­ous for­mer Cata­lan of­fi­cials ac­cused of hav­ing used pub­lic monies to pro­mote Cat­alo­nia abroad, al­though not a sin­gle Span­ish law or legal pro­nounce­ment has de­clared this to be il­le­gal. But the Court of Au­di­tors doesn’t give a tin­ker’s bot­tom burp about that, be­cause none of its mem­bers are judges, but rather party po­lit­i­cal ap­point­ments (seven have been cho­sen by the Pop­u­lar Party, four by the So­cial­ist Party) who work to­gether like one big fam­ily, lit­er­ally: of its 700 em­ploy­ees, a hun­dred have fam­ily con­nec­tions to high-rank­ing Span­ish civil ser­vants or to pres­i­dents of the in­sti­tu­tion, in­clud­ing two cousins of the cur­rent pres­i­dent, a brother of a for­mer Prime Min­is­ter of Spain (Aznar), and the wife and sis­ter-in-law of one of the cur­rent Coun­cil­lors. When im­pos­ing fines on Cata­lan of­fi­cials - such as the four mil­lion euros which they ex­pect the for­mer Cata­lan Econ­omy min­is­ter, An­dreu Mas-Col­lell, to cough up (thirty-three Nobel prize-win­ning econ­o­mists have signed a pe­ti­tion in protest at this at­tempt to ruin their highly re­spected col­league) - the Court of Au­di­tors doesn’t fol­low due process of any kind. With al­lies like that, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment can af­ford to par­don a few po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers.

But why did it de­cide to do so now? Partly be­cause it’s been slapped over the wrist dur­ing the last cou­ple of years by all the prin­ci­pal human rights or­gan­i­sa­tions, as well as var­i­ous or­gan­isms be­long­ing to the UN and the Coun­cil of Eu­rope (which in its last re­port de­scribed the Span­ish ju­di­ciary as being sim­i­lar in its be­hav­iour to that of Turkey); and partly be­cause be­fore the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s term of of­fice comes to an end the Eu­ro­pean Court of Human Rights will al­most cer­tainly de­clare the trial of the Cata­lan Nine to be null and void (and in­hu­mane) on the grounds that it was used not to pun­ish gen­uine crimes but to defuse a po­lit­i­cal move­ment. That would have in­volved not only the im­me­di­ate re­lease of the pris­on­ers, but would have al­lowed them full po­lit­i­cal rights and en­ti­tled them to de­mand com­pen­sa­tion. In a state in which over 60% of the pop­u­la­tion think that even the re­cent con­di­tional par­dons should not have been made, that would have been a cat­a­stro­phe for the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party. Whereas for the state’s judges and au­di­tors it would have been noth­ing worse - as has been the case with other in­ter­na­tional cen­sures of their hand­i­work - than water off a very slip­pery duck’s back.